In terms of revenue, the Book Publishing sector is set to depict a market size of $29.8 billion in 2022. However, this translates into anticipation that the market size of the book publishing sector will decrease by 0.2%.

These anticipations are based on the past records noted between 2017 and 2022 when the market size of the US book publishing business decreased by 2.1% year on average. While the US Book Publishing sector is the 328th largest and the 20th largest Information industry in terms of market size, there are several challenges the industry faces.

Does it need to take steps that can bring an overhaul in its market expectations? Does it need to take help from technological advancements like AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Resource planning software systems to see an improvement?

There are many questions on this front, which will also be the topic of conversation in this post. We shall start from the very basics where we learn about the publishing industry and its various operations in the US markets; we shall also look into how an ERP can offer much-needed respite to the sector to regain its strength.

Let’s look at what this page takes us through:

• What is meant by Publishing Industry?
• How does a Publishing Company Work?
• What is ERP?
• Why does the Publishing Industry Need ERP?
• What are the Challenges in the Publishing Sector?
• How can ERP help the Publishing Industry?
• Conclusion
• How can Deskera Help You?
• Key Takeaways
• Related Articles

What is meant by Publishing Industry?

Publishing, in simple terms, means making information publicly available. The publishing industry predominantly revolves around publishing newspapers, magazines, maps, government information, music, and books.

With multiple options for publishing, today, the information can be published and be made available in various formats, including print, websites or digital or e-publishing, DVDs, and apps. While many kinds of information find their way to its audience through one of these mediums of publishing, there are formal and government documents or publications that must adhere to certain compliances before getting published.

In this article, we shall take a long informational tour of the publishing process, including both print and e-publishing.

So, let’s get started.

Types and Stages of Publishing

Publishing can be done in a variety of forms, and the one you choose is predominantly determined by the market for the book. Let’s understand the types of publishing and the way they work in this sub-section. There are three main types of publishing, as enumerated in the following:

1. Self-publishing
2. Hybrid Publishing
3. Traditional Publishing

Self-publishing

This is when the Author decides to publish the book themselves. However, they may still be required to pay for an editor, a proofreader, or an illustrator based on their work requirement. Various self-publishing platforms allow authors to publish their work all by themselves.

Hybrid Publishing

This is one of the least expensive ways to publish. Hybrid publishing is like self-publishing in that the writer or the author typically maintains complete creative control and ownership of their content and materials. Instead of hiring a number of different companies to produce and publish the book, the author may employ just one company to handle every aspect of the publishing process. The hybrid publisher takes all the editing, typesetting, book cover design, etc.

Traditional Publishing: There are many different types and sizes of conventional publishers.

Traditional publishers purchase the rights to publish, sell, and distribute a book from an author by giving them an advance. Most conventional publishers do not accept direct submissions from writers or author contact. To interact with the publisher and land a book deal, you need to have connections in the industry or a literary agency.

Stages of Publishing

Speaking of the stages involved in the process of publishing, there are a number of steps that a book or a written work of art must go through to find its place among the target audience. The process of publishing actually involves multiple stages and can take at least a year. The time period may be shortened if your work is already being considered by a publisher or publishing house. Here are the steps:

1. Acquisitions
2. Editing
3. Design and typesetting
4. Proofreading
5. Printing
6. Sales
7. Marketing
8. Publicity

Besides the stages, the publishing process also comprises certain significant practices that must be complied with.

How does a Publishing Company Work?

We have read books and magazines and admired so many of them. However, a lot goes behind the scenes in a publishing company to put together one book or magazine for its target readers.

The following explanation takes us through the tasks that the publishing company undertakes to publish a single book.

Finding Author: The journey starts with acquiring an author who is an SME or subject matter expert on a given topic. Most of the time, the authors themselves approach a publishing house to publish their books.

Often, there are agents that offer to read many manuscripts, which are unpublished books, and try to get in touch with a publisher. Most publishing companies receive manuscripts from agents instead of authors.

Editing: Once the publishing house is convinced about the potential of the book, they buy it from the author and start with their work on the book. The text must go through brutal editing, proofreading, and formatting process, all of which are mostly done based on the in-house style of the publishing house.

The editing process is typical for all books irrespective of the type of book; whether it is a cookbook, a children’s comic, a novel, a magazine, etc. All changes suggested by the editor are included in the book after the author’s approval.

Production Process: This process involves the work of the production team that is responsible for putting together the book, whether an e-book or a printed version. Also, this team oversees the other teams' work and checks if every operation is on schedule. They ensure that the book publishing does not get delayed and goes live within the set duration.

Sales: The sales team begins its work by initiating a sales pitch for the book to shops and outlets they believe will be successful in selling it. When the book has to be released internationally, the international sales team connects with retailers in other nations. Apart from looking after the sales cycle, the sales team also ensures that the bookstores have enough inventory.

Marketing and Publicity: The marketing teams undertake and run marketing campaigns to guarantee a boost in sales. Marketers typically oversee sponsored advertising and promotions as the campaign's primary goal will be to increase sales. Publicists coordinate book promotion and sales activities as well as attempt to secure media coverage.

Sales and marketing collaborate closely to ensure that retailers are aware of the promotions that are taking place. Bookstores will want to stock additional copies if a publicist was successful in getting the book covered widely in the media. Although the campaign may begin long before a book is released and go on after it is written, most of the activity is often concentrated around a book's release date.

Final Publishing: Once all the above steps are completed, it is time to publish the book. The book is now ready to be presented to the audience or readers.

All the above steps depict the typical path taken to publish a book; however, there may be many other steps involved such as releasing the audio version of the book (an audiobook) or having the book released in different languages. Each of these cases will again require many agents, people, and processes to be incorporated.

Also, while this is how the books have been conventionally published, the publishing sector seeks to rely on and implement new-age technologies like an ERP system to overcome the challenges on its way. We shall be looking at the challenges at a later stage in the post and will also learn what makes an ERP the need of the hour for the sector.

Let’s learn in brief, what an ERP is.

What is ERP?

Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP, as the name goes, helps a company to plan and organize its resources in a way that they can be utilized optimally. Numerous units and departments exist within an organization, and innumerable people work in those departments.

Based on the type and size of the business, the departments and their styles may differ; yet, there are some common aspects in every business. While companies try to get all their units to work optimally well, they almost always face challenges. These challenges could be due to a variety of factors, such as teams completing tasks manually, having no access to real-time updates, and so on.

This is when ERP software can work wonders and bring the entire organization on the same page. Let’s look at some of the standard features an ERP offers.

Why does the Publishing Industry Need ERP?

We have known some of the most well-known publishing and printing enterprises to have benefited from the use of ERP. It has been crucial in lowering operating costs, increasing efficiency, minimizing waste, and creating a robust procedural ecosystem.

The following sub-points will take us through the crucial areas where publishing houses need ERP. Let’s take a look.

Editorial Management

A workflow management system called Editorial Management (EM) was created to simplify editorial workflows, communications, and file storage. The process is the first stage of the publication process and can be described through the following points:

Author’s submission

The author submits a new document or a revised version of an existing document/article or post. They may also share a record that has been updated. This submission is sent to the editor.

Assigning Editor

The document submitted by the author is picked up by an editor who is assigned to check or validate the accuracy or authenticity of the submitted manuscript.

Assigning Tasks

The editor goes through the document for the checks based on the pre-defined in-house styles of document correction. They may also point out any discrepancies, faults, or incorrect inclusions, which will again be redirected toward the reviewer.

Reviewing the document.

The document that comprises the editor’s comments and corrections is passed on to a reviewer. They may be external or from an internal team. The reviewer gathers all suggestions, goes through them, and after a discussion with the editor determines if the document or book is ready for publishing.

Decision Making

After a lot f to-and-fro revisions of the book or the written word, the reviewer and editors finally make a decision if the book is good enough to be passed on to the next stage. At this stage, they may also send the book back to the previous stages if they believe certain parts in the book need corrections or improvements.

In other words, the book can not go through this stage if the reviewers are not completely satisfied.

Notifying the Author

Once the review of the book or piece of work is complete, the authors are notified about the decision of the reviewer. If there are revisions to be made, the authors are invited to make the necessary changes; and if the book is through to the publishing stage, then the authors may be notified of the same and are requested to submit another draft of a new document.

This sums up the editorial process in an editorial management system. There are millions of registered users using Editorial Manager worldwide. By establishing specific roles, the Editorial management system facilitates a role-based approach, making it simple for publishers to govern user permissions.

Tracking Royalty and Calculations

The sum that a publisher pays an author in exchange for the right to publish their book is known as book royalty. Percentages of book sales are used to compute royalties. An author might receive 7% royalties on book sales and 20% on e-Book sales, for instance.

ERP enables you to efficiently manage licensing programs and accurately recognize revenue. The publication firms can also manage outgoing royalties using automated procedures and connected ERP systems. Additionally, identifying and monitoring media rights becomes easy with an ERP implementation.

ERP helps publishing companies in increasing visibility into accruals, streamline royalty management procedures, and accurately compute royalties and rights. Tracking and data management are essential to guarantee that the royalties are paid out correctly. All this is possible as the transactional, financial, and master data are all accessible in one place.

Also, with direction from the order-to-cash process, you can now identify the sale of relevant products and decide who should be paid, how much, and when. A module or administrator specifically created to track incentives can accurately assess royalties and rights by automating, verifying, and simplifying the processes that can imply the difference between profit and loss.

Title Lifecycle Management

Managing intellectual property is one of the prime concerns in any business. In the case of the publishing industry, the book titles are intellectual property and these must be managed with extreme meticulousness.

An ERP system enables the editors to utilize the modules to manage title structure types. With a configurable system, the company may also have multiple apps on a single tool to enhance its title management tasks. A title manager can be an initial step that would help with budget planning even though there is a lack of complete information pertaining to the planned title.

You can save time by using a title structure manager app to define the qualities of new titles based on title templates. By choosing from a number of settings, the title metadata editing apps make inserting and modifying metadata extremely flexible. You can design your own user interface for title management by deciding which qualities and data should be used in your workflow.

Sales Price Management

ERP makes it simple to break down complicated price structures. An intelligent, browser-based software simplifies the construction of complicated price structures and offers a clear, thorough overview of all product prices. Give your sales and planning staff the tools they need to manage product sizes and prices for all types of items in an open and transparent manner.

Customers-specific price lists can be created using most sales price manager apps. The models used in the app enable price calculation by product edition or by time period. Complete price history is offered for any reference by any authorized user of the company.

The relationship to a particular product is always apparent because most ERP systems automatically allocate product prices on an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) or the unique article number. Moreover, the system is suitable for foreign sales as well. The integration supports a variety of price types (base price, additional price, and so on) and currencies in addition to the net and gross prices. It also paves the way for generating specific costs for various nations using fully configurable rounding techniques.

Production Management

Production depends directly on the demand of the products in the market. Many of your products must be delivered on time in order for your titles to be produced and released on schedule. You will need to make sure that everything is delivered on schedule. Implement procedures as well to prevent any errors or hiccups in the shipping and delivery process.

Additionally, determining whether a change in vendors or a search for new ones is necessary may be vital. While attempting to optimize your shipping and delivery, you must also ascertain whether your suppliers can simply get in touch with you and contact you regarding the orders they need to discuss.

Your dashboard on the ERP system can help you with all this information so that everything takes place smoothly.

Management of Subscriptions

A thing or a group of items that can be utilized for a subscription, such as regular services, use fees, and one-time costs, is called a subscription plan. A subscription may include several plans. You may now effortlessly manage your subscriptions using ERP software.

A single subscriber may hold multiple subscriptions concurrently. Additionally, the system automatically takes care of managing your subscriptions for you by creating new invoices as they become due; this way, it also takes care of updating the subscription status.

An ERP enables you to add invoicing and pricing details to your subscriptions. Each subscription plan has invoicing and pricing details for a specific item that is tied to it. A single entity can support several subscription plans. You can also introduce various modes or levels of subscriptions such as 'Basic' or a 'Premium' subscription.

You may also choose to manually cancel, restart, recalculate, or update a subscription. You could also use it to define a time window for past-due invoices. If there is an overdue invoice that is not paid even after the waiting period, you may also choose to have a subscription canceled.

Publishing Workflow Management

Workflow usually refers to every procedure you must follow to get the desired outcome. Likewise, publishing companies must ensure that their workflow or operations support their ultimate destination, which is to publish standard and quality content. Consequently, a publishing workflow is made up of everything that must take place before publication.

By acting as a link between people and data, an enterprise system like an ERP can significantly improve workflow management. However, using such solutions successfully requires careful planning and preparation. To map out their processes and modify the workflow models in their ERP software, businesses must thoroughly examine their own operations. Let’s look at the basic outline of the publishing workflow.

To achieve cohesiveness through these processes, publishing businesses should:

• Bring managers from all disciplines together to determine the processes that various users complete.
• Introduce the teams and the managers to the systems that make their tasks easy and help them draw connections between the operations.
• Determine and keep track of who is in charge of the respective decision points of the process.

With this kind of process map in place, you can align your backend databases, including the ERP. The entire process will be helpful to align the routinely carried out tasks by developing a functional understanding of the organization across all teams.

There are various advantages of having an ERP for managing your workflow which can be enumerated as follows:

• Better communication: No more struggling with lost files or challenges with communication and teamwork.
• Automation and scalability: Manage your content with ease owing to automated processes.
• Streamlined processes: Save time by streamlining the process, which enables using the time available fruitfully and in productive activities.
• Accumulated resources: Once the content has been submitted, it gets stored in the central system and is always available.
• Readily available archives: Going back to earlier submissions for future or reconsideration with archived submissions is made easy.
• Other content concerns: From tagging and labeling to archiving and storing content for simple retrieval and assessments can be done much more straightforwardly with an automated system.

What are the Challenges in the Publishing Sector?

The challenges of the sector begin with the huge volume of content pouring down on publishers who accept open submissions. This can easily overwhelm the editorial staff as the publishing world simultaneously becomes bigger and more varied.

Modern publishers face three growing challenges:

• an abundance of content
• escalating market competition, and
• dwindling consumer attention

All these call for streamlining the editorial process from calling for submissions to final content that is ready for press. However, streamlining should be done while keeping in mind the reader's preferences as well. The question is: how can one achieve all this, altogether?

The solution is in implementing more effective processes that may produce excellent outcomes without sacrificing the individualized touch that collaboration between editors and writers adds to top-notch material.

Compliance and Copyrights

Intellectual property is seen as a vital tool for economic development. Based on the idea that authors of intellectual property require a motivation to be innovative, the copyright system was developed. This can be accomplished only by defending their creation against infringement or imitation. The digital environment has disturbed the balance between different interest groups over access to and reproduction of copyright material, which has presented several difficulties for copyright owners. There are several ways in which this interruption occurs:

The Internet has made reproduction and access more effortless, and the replicated material can match the original in terms of quality. Additionally, copying and reproducing the content protected by copyright has become increasingly simpler and quicker owing to the many readily available apps and tools.

For small and medium-sized publishing enterprises, keeping up with governmental rules, industry standards, and corporate quality goals has become a challenge. The rules governing the management of electronic data continue to change in addition to the various layers of standards and regulations that your firm must follow. This becomes problematic and difficult to keep a track of. Therefore, you must take the support of industry experts and specialized guidance.

Royalty Management

The proper handling of royalties has proven to be another difficult task. The process requires them to scrutinize legal documents to describe the intricate interaction between publishers and copyright owners. Additionally, it is necessary to diligently and skillfully categorize the relationship between supply chain partners and intellectual property rights owners. It is the responsibility of the companies to ensure that all the legal aspects are covered; as ignoring this issue can make them susceptible to legal troubles.

Any such problem can be simply avoided by making sure that royalties are managed on time and that every legal aspect is specified in the contract. A simple way to prevent it is to deploy an ERP integrated with a royalty management tool. However, despite this fact, managing royalties accurately is still a challenge for most publications.

Optimum Supply Chain Management

The bar for publishing has been lowered during the last few years as a result of the spread of advanced publishing technology. Everyone has the opportunity to self-publish their own work and break into the writing world. Nowadays, he writers sell books, interact with their fans directly, and go on to become well-known authors. The sales of actual paper books are, however, dropping as new forms of publication emerge. It contributes to the publishing market's supply-demand asymmetry.

Some reasons noted for this asymmetry in the publishing sector’s supply chain are as follows

• Rising costs of shipping containers: Earlier, the shipping containers costed roughly $2500, but now they cost around $25,000.
• Increased amount of waiting time at the dock: Even if the books get loaded in a container, the waiting time for the containers at the docks is too long. This takes a toll on the supply chain.
• Shortage of workers at the warehouses
• COVID-19 has only added fuel to the fire

Without a centralized system, the companies remain under the burden of struggling supply chains.

Reducing the use of Paper and Other Manual Tasks

Like many other sectors, the publishing industry also reals under the struggles of manual and tedious tasks. The tediousness is primarily observed between the editorial and reviewing processes where the staff still manually shares the file they have updated.

This is done mostly through e-mails where the authors share their manuscript to the editors, The editors then work on the first draft and take it forward for further processing. Sometimes their are hiccups in sharing when the files are too large and cannot be shared over an email due to file-size limitations. This creates problems and results in delays.

Aside from the editorial works, there are other departments, too, that undertake manual or paper-based tasks and struggle with delays and errors. The data entry, accounting teams, and sales teams are also subjected to manual tasks which add to the list of challenges the industry faces.

In the absence of a centralized system that helps updating the documents in real-time, these challenges become increasingly problematic.

Inconsistent Revenue

The times have changed and so have the way businesses operate. However, some companies are not yet aligned with the times in terms of the software used and the methods of operations. This is the reason their productivity and revenue suffer.

This applies especially to the small- and medium-sized publishers' financial structures. Publishers will need to diversify their funding sources, streamline their accounting procedures, and perform a thorough credit risk analysis to remedy this situation. They can reduce their operating costs by doing this.

Battle of Digital Vs. Print

While the advent of the digital age has opened up a wide range of new opportunities for all sectors, small and medium publishers are still finding it a challenge to deal with this change. Online reading is becoming more and more popular. Instead of being able to harness the positive side of digitalization, small publishers have been bearing the brunt of it unnecessarily.

This calls for SMEs to change the way they produce, channel, and share content if they want to thrive and adapt to the future. It will be necessary to use the opportunities that come with digital infrastructure to realign the entire publishing industry to meet the demands and requirements of modern-day readers.

Lack of Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

Recent years have seen tremendous digital transformation, and the publishing sector is no stranger to it. However, two of the main issues the publishing industry has been facing as a result of digital transformation are:

1. the efficient use of digital channels to acquire new readers
2. grow a loyal client base

There are many ways in which they can do so. Yet, using marketing channels like enterprise SEO, local SEO, content strategy, or social media effectively can be challenging for many publishers.

Businesses need to focus on providing better digital experiences, website designs, and brand presentations. These are some of their biggest problems. As a part of marketing operations, the environment will encounter a number of difficulties in the coming times. Therefore, the scenario requires companies to work on chalking out marketing strategies to help them overcome the problematic tide.

Demographics

Advertising is one of the mightiest ways you grab the attention of the t